The Aristocrats

I think I was going to post some other cutesy idea this week but this Brett Kavanaugh stuff is occupying too much space in my brain and I wanted to get some thoughts out, so I'm not turning it over in my head all the time.

The fact is, despite all the hot takes on Twitter, or the Saturday Night Live jokes, or the collections of photos of Judge Kavanaugh yelling while women behind him look unhappy, I don't see our side winning this one. The Republicans are trying to ram their guy through, and would really wish all this scrutiny would just go away so they can go back to dismantling the rule of law and criminalizing everyone who isn't a rich, white, male patrician Southerner or East Coaster.

I watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony unfold on Twitter, following on as people who were watching it posted quotes and thoughts. I did the same in the afternoon when Kavanaugh took the stand, and was left with a sense of a man insulted that his right to this position is being questioned. I saw the photos of him yelling, read the quotes where he denounced "the left", and have to agree that this is not the impartial judge the country needs.

That sense of entitlement bothered me, as an inchoate thing I couldn't define, until I saw a thread on Twitter by Matt Stoller, where he linked what we're seeing to the moral system of aristocracy - the idea that only the elite has rights and that we're meant to put up with it. That's going to be the defining sense of this era of American politics, assuming there are any eras of American politics to follow.

We've seen it with all the people this "president" has selected for his cabinet, from movie producers in charge of the treasury to billionaire heiresses in charge of education. There's no sense of selecting the right people for the job, just rewarding cronies for their financial support, and doing it so brazenly and openly that those of us who choose to protest can be laughed off - because after all, this is America and we don't have aristocracies here.

Stoller rightly points out that the Democrats are complicit in this atmosphere of elites, given their epic tone-deafness in losing the very bedrock of their support in 2016, without even noticing. The only difference, and this is subtle, is that for all her "my turn" approach to campaigning, Hillary Clinton never threw a tantrum like a baby in front of the Senate judiciary committee.

But let's not deny that for the moment the greater threat is the Republicans, and their likely voters. The first thing Stoller notes is how Kavanaugh's show of emotion is taken as "authenticity" by many on the right; I go a step further by noting that a lot of these folks are content to let anybody into office, as long as they're committed to the GOP's goals of dismantling the very concept of administrative government.

What they don't see is that each of these actions builds on the ones before it to undermine the independence of our institutions, as well as the public's faith in them. They probably don't care, and they probably think that doing this just entrenches them further into power. They're probably right.

The simple fact is that even though the accusations against him are credible, and there's no statute of limitations for such crimes in Maryland, Kavanaugh's not going to go to criminal trial for his assaults, and even if he did it'd be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what he did. That's not great, but if the norms of civilized behavior were being followed, the GOP would go to the next page of their grimoire of potential candidates until they found a loathsome entity without any behavior that can be attributed to him.

Unfortunately, we can't even clear that low a bar, and so the Republicans are going to fight to get this specific guy onto the Supreme Court, no matter what accusations have been leveled against him. And many on the right are going to bleat that what a man does at 17 shouldn't disqualify him for office later in life, because he agrees with them about how those blacks/gays/women/whatever have too much power for their own good.

So I expect the FBI investigation to be a formality, for Kavanaugh to be approved with a simple minority in the Senate (a friend predicted that Mike Pence would cast the deciding vote, but I don't believe that), and he's going to infest our lives for the next thirty years or so. And in the years to come, it won't matter, because presidents after this one, if there are to be any, will continue to do whatever they want with ever less regard for norms and laws, until they can just hand the office to their sons.

Not that I'm pessimistic or anything.